


A trace on the earth

by keeptheearthbelow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 02:53:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1452769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keeptheearthbelow/pseuds/keeptheearthbelow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss's discovery of flowers planted in the forest leads Peeta to express a wish for the future. Written for the Prompts in Panem challenge "The Language of Flowers" for jonquil = desire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A trace on the earth

**Author's Note:**

> I love learning how to read the forest like this, though I'm not very skilled at it yet, so it was fun to have the chance to work the concept into a story. I'm on tumblr at keeptheearthbelowff if you'd like to come say hi!

They hike a new route through the woods today, up over a ridge that Katniss never used to cross when she was a child. She has tried hunting here recently, and this is the first time she's taken Peeta here. They follow the spine of the ridge and descend along a shoulder covered in mountain laurel in bloom. She follows a stream down into the hollow. 

“Do you still know where we're going?” Peeta asks her. 

“Yes. You'll see,” she assures him. 

The slope flattens out, and she says, “Here we are.” 

Peeta stops beside her and looks around at the trees. “Okay.” 

She grins, hardly able to hold it in. “See if you can see what this is.”

He looks at her, one eyebrow raised. But they do this kind of thing often on their walks, challenging each other's observation skills, making a game of it. He paces through the trees, comparing them to each other, looking at the little dips and rises of the ground. Katniss has a seat on an overgrown pile of stones. She thinks he's putting it together, but he looks at her and says, “Give me a hint.” 

She points to brown, withered stalks in the dappled light. “See those? They're daffodils. They were in bloom when I came here before.” 

He goes over and looks. Half the stalks have fallen down entirely. He finds a decaying flower. “Those don't grow in the woods. On their own, I mean.”

“Nope.”

He looks again at the ground, at the trees. He scuffs through the leaves and vegetation in a few places to see the soil and comes up with a fragment of pottery. Comes over and looks at her pile of stones, brushes the moss off a couple to look at their edges. “This used to be something.”

“I think so.”

“Is this enough stone for a chimney?” She grins at him, and he continues, “Somebody planted flowers, and those apple trees, and maybe had a roadway over there where it's sunken down. Somebody lived here. In a wooden house, because there isn't anything left of the walls.”

She nods, excited to share this find with him. And he seems pleased too, at the thought of it. During their picnic lunch beside the old chimney, they muse about how long ago it could have been and whether the people here would've known the people who lived in the old concrete house by the lake. But as they leave for home, he gets solemn and he looks back repeatedly at the place as it disappears within the trees.

He brings home a book on bulb plants from the circulating library a few days later, and spends the evenings reading it carefully. They have some tulips by the front porch that the Capitol planted back when they maintained these houses, but neither Katniss nor Peeta has ever paid them much attention, preferring instead the vegetables and the primroses.

A few weeks later, he says, “Would you take me to visit where that old house was again?”

The mountain laurel on the route is past its peak, but the crab apple is in bloom now and the entire canopy overhead is rich green. The bushes in the stream valley have gotten difficult to push through. When they arrive, Peeta carefully looks for all the old daffodil stems. Then he gets a trowel and some burlap bags from his pack.

“Are you digging them up?” Katniss says, baffled.

“Yes. Not all of them. I guess once the blooms have completely died they should do okay with being dug up and moved.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “I don't want them to be here in the … at the end of everything. I just think some should come with us, so they don't get forgotten.”

She doesn't really understand, but she helps him put the bulbs with their roots in the burlap sacks, carefully cradled with scoops of the soil they came out of. “When they come up next year,” he tells her, “we'll be able to figure out if they're daffodils or this other flower called jonquils.”

He plants the bulbs in their yard as soon as they arrive home, working by the light of the sun as it sinks behind the trees and then by the lamplight spilling out of the living room windows. Before he comes to bed, he looks anxiously out into the darkness. “They'll be okay,” she assures him. “We'll look after them.”

The next spring, she has more or less forgotten about them, but at the first spear of green reaching out of the soil, Peeta is ecstatic. When they're in bloom, the scent is heady and strong enough to rise on warm air into the bedroom windows at night. 

“I want to go see the others, the kin to these ones,” he tells her as he turns out the bedside lamp. “If you'll come with me. I couldn't find it by myself.”

She agrees, but dwells on it, curled up beside him in the darkness. Eventually, she asks, “Why are these flowers so important to you?”

Slowly, he says, “It isn't the flowers themselves. It's that they persisted out there. They told us that somebody had a life out there and had something beautiful.”

She doesn't disagree, but she doesn't really see why this is any different from the concrete house by the lake.

Waiting for him to elaborate, she breathes in the scent of the flowers and moves her hands across his chest. He strokes her hair and down her back, then pulls her half on top of him. Against her neck, he murmurs, “I want us to last that long.”

“What, do you want to have another toasting?” she smiles in the dark.

“Not like that. This,” he says, arms around her. “I want there to be a record of us forever.”

“We're in the history books,” she says softly. They will probably be in history books for as long a time as she can imagine, which isn't quite forever but may as well be. She doesn't want to think about that; she kisses him instead. He sighs and pulls her hips against his.

“Not that either. Not what happened to us. What we _are_. What we've made,” he whispers. “I want us to leave a trace on the earth like that. That anybody coming after us can see that we made a home. That we made a life for ourselves, that we had something good.”

When their house has fallen down, he means — when the memory of Victor's Village is gone and the bricks are crumbling and the forest has marched back across the lawns.

“We will,” she tells him, because he makes her believe it could be possible. “We will.”


End file.
